


iron & forget-me-nots

by cherubique



Category: The Moorchild - Eloise McGraw
Genre: Family Fluff, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 02:29:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20332555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherubique/pseuds/cherubique
Summary: Yanno is the village’s blacksmith, nestled deep in the heath of the moors. Though he and his wife Anwara are judged heavily for their changeling daughter Moql, he adores the girl who calls him father to no end.





	iron & forget-me-nots

**Author's Note:**

> the moorchild is the single most influential book i read as a young girl, and i heavily related to moql growing up. her and yanno's father-daughter relationship is so sweet, and i hope i paid it a little tribute with this piece. :-)

Yanno has gentle eyes and a body that smells of iron, baked in and smelted deep with the forge’s roar. He carries his work with him always. His hands are soaked in a perpetual reminder of the art of blacksmithing. Calluses whorl across his palms and fingertips, rasping against cold iron as he turns it this way and that- looking for where best to strike it into submission. The blows come hard and fast, powerful swings from overhead like the Archangel Michael’s own sword cutting down the damned. His tools are an extension of his body, singing in accordance as they bend malleable metal into objects with newfound purpose after being ripped from the earth’s incubating womb.

The workshop is open to the air. Visitors often stop by. Whether they’re there to pick up commissioned horseshoes or new spades to bite into the soft loam and turf of fresh earth, they all have one thing in common. Their eyes drift with undisguised disgust and fascination, a raw morbidity keening through their expressions as their gaze settles heavily on Moql’s shoulders, redolent with judgement. The witchling, the freakyodd child, the blacksmith’s swapped baby. 

Sometimes they whisper without bothering to hide their mouths behind their hands to smother the caught syllables. It’s as if they think she’s incapable of hearing them, as she sits there on a low end table, picking at cattail fluffs in between slim, slender fingers. Yanno gathers them for her, from a thicket behind the slop bins of the animals. It’s one of Moql’s easiest chores, to pull out the puffiness for tinder. She’s always mindlessly absorbed in the texture the same way that Yanno eyes the grain and sheaves of metal sliding across one another, and it is the strongest similarity they have- that ability to lose themselves in the material world. But Moql feels the villager’s barbed tongues, alright. 

They comment on her appearance, the way her skin is an echo of the forest’s limbs, hair the downiness of clouds overhead. She doesn’t look like any of the other mousy children of the village, dun and tan. Her eyes evade them, always shifting through a rota of hues. On some days they catch the bright green of new sprouts poking their way through topsoil. On others, it’s the violet-blue tinge of water at sunset, where the wives scrub and soak clothing and the children splash around. Sometimes they’re as flat and stony as the shale sheets that line the riverbed.

Once, they’re as ripe red as the raspberries she sticks onto her fingers to nibble at. On that day, the housewives run shrieking when they find her perched in the bowers of a towering oak tree. It was her hair that gave her away, immaculately pale against the leafy foliage. She’d stared down at them, head tilted to the side like an inquisitive bird. A tiny sparrow. Moql’s eyes are always supernaturally bright, as if eerily lit up from behind, some wanderlight gleaning from deep within her skull. A calf wanders off, swallowed by some boggy patch in the moors, and they are quick to point fingers of blame in her direction. It’s only when Yanno spends the day pointedly beating his anvil like it owes him a blood debt that they back off, eyes narrowed and tongues curbed in their jaws sullenly.

Whatever the shade of Moql’s eyes, they didn’t match her parents. Yanno was an echo of his craft. His hair was solid black with grey threads shining in his beard like the silverskin on hunks of flesh, skin near silvery-pale beneath the carbon smudges and sooty fingerprints thumbed along his fluting cheekbones. Anwara harkened the liveliness of sunrise: a dawn flush of dainty wisps of cirrus clouds and cheeks pinched the pink of the fledgling sun. Her hair was bright red, red enough to singe fingertips on, the same ruddy flesh of raspberries brought to hungry lips and bitten into with fervour.

By comparison, Moql’s whitish hair, the same brittle blonde of dried hay stood out starkly. You could pick her out immediately from the lineup of children on sacred festival days, when the sunfaded ribbons of the Maypole were wound by small hands and twirling loosely in the breeze. She was a foot taller than any boy or girl among them by the time the oldest boy in the village hopped astride his first horse. _His dandelion,_ Yanno would say, ruffling her hair with one of his large, calloused hands. In those moments of praise and affection, she felt like her namesake. Dandy, and fierce like a lion. Proud as a pride, her wild mane of flyaway curls something beautiful. 

Away from him though, she felt conspicuous, a too tall weed ready to be struck down by the harvest’s scythes. Like flaxen wheat, she swayed and bent with the winds, a slip of a girl darting in and out of sight, winding her limbs around saplings like she was one with them. Her ankles perpetually peeked out of the ends of her wading breeches, and Anwara would sigh, pressing her lips together into a thin line. The flesh would redden as if rubbed with peppers, with the heat of all of the words she left unsaid. 

The iron horseshoe studded steadfastly to the doorway of his workshop deterred her when it was right side up. She couldn’t cross without hopping a mad little dance, as if a colony of ants were biting her something fierce. He’d turn it upside down when she wanted to visit him, tossing little handfuls of wildflowers across the threshold to catch his attention when he was quenching bright copper in barrels of water. 

He’d smile, and walk over easily, long stride eating up the paces of the floor in great big gulps. Moql would dangle her feet off of the edge of the work bench, shying away from the smith’s work, and she’d chatter to him, bright little voice breaking through the monotony. She’d prattle on for hours, about everything and nothing, and afterwards he would stoop to press a kiss to the crown of her head. Yanno was always careful to never touch her with his gloved hands, stinking of iron.

He’d carved her wooden bedframe, out of deliciously scented sandalwood. He’d done so after finding her asleep in the pile of lumber scraps one day, curled up like a rolypoly bug, face buried into her arms. He’d been careful not to use any metal tools, slowly and meticulously whittling and smoothing down the wood with various stone tools, clumsy looking in his skilled hands. 

It took him far longer than it would have, with proper saws and hammers and pliers, and Anwara simply sighed, throwing her hands up into the air as she watched. Moql had grinned from behind his shoulder, happily giving him input on the type of stained finish she wanted on it, little scorched in swirling designs along the headrest etched in personally, his hand guiding her own. Because of this archaic stone-working, she could change the coverlets and the bedding with her own hands, not flinching or grabbing her hands backwards as if burnt when she brushed against the wooden supports.

The quilt he made her out of piecemeal scraps of too small clothes and long nights staring at the flickering embers in the fireplace he didn’t dare stir for fear of waking Moql up with a scattering of light had been stitched together with a wooden needle gifted by the local witch. It was little more than a splinter, polished to a razor thin edge that cut through even the thickest denim like softened butter ready to be kneaded into flour for pie crusts.

He’d swaggered up a little awkwardly, shoulders bunched around his ears, mouth mumbling the words: unsure of how to ask a favour, so used to providing them. She’d smiled, that wicked little grin that Moql had long since copied, bunching up her left cheek as if someone had tugged on a piece of thread, and told him to make every stitch count. He’d nodded reverently, and then scampered away, practicing with the odds and ends cobbled into throws for the horses. His stitches weren’t as small as seed pearls, not like those made by Anwara’s careful hands for Moql’s smocks and skirts, but they were lovingly done all the same. 

Every night, you could find Yanno stripped to the waist out in the river behind the house, soaking himself in the frigid water. A bar of Anwara’s soap would be clutched in his hand, made diminutive by scale, and the suds would froth downstream, carried off into the vastness of the waterways. He’d come inside, shirt sticking to his chest and hair plastered down flat, smelling of nothing more than honeysuckle and forget me nots- flowers sacred to the Fae. 

People shook their heads in distaste, at his madness and futility of it all, since by the next day he’d have the same little carbon soot trails all over his face from itching at the sweat that’d run down in rivulets when the flames roared at their height. Still, he’d bathe, water sluicing over his shoulders and snaking cold trails down the length of his long spine.

Even in winter, when he’d come in shivering, steam roiling off of his shoulders from the body heat emanating from his muscled frame, he’d dutifully scrub away the iron of his living. 

Then, Yanno always bundled up Moql beneath the covers like he was handling something precious, something he was afraid to break. The quilt would be smoothed out overtop of her, the colourful medley of fabrics and hues making her grin- an echo of the lush flora of the forest, of the sweets he would sneak her after dinner, of the tiny chapbooks he would buy from tinkers’ carts to read out loud to her in his low voice. He’d sit on the end of her bed, watching as her ever indeterminable eyes fluttered, lulled into a drowse of sleep by his deep baritone telling her stories about the sprites of the moors, of her family and heritage beyond this one.

The blacksmith might have a changeling daughter, but he adored her beyond any measure of their world, or any liminal space beyond it’s comprehension.


End file.
